Recommended Listening: The Old Men Edition
Three albums, all from 2014, all by men with deep voices and deeper histories.
I didn’t plan it that way — didn’t realize the pattern until the third one landed — but apparently this is my Old Men With Nothing Left to Prove era. None of these are easy listens, but that’s not the point. They’re heavy, hypnotic, unhurried, they stretch out, take their time, and dare you to keep up. But if you’re in the right mood — or the wrong one — they’ll find you.
Like hearing opera echoing through a collapsing parking garage. Walker doesn’t sing so much as stage a séance — muttering, shrieking, crooning — while Sunn hold a single, throbbing note like it’s the only thing keeping the room from falling apart. It’s not background music. You don’t listen to this. You surrender to it.
This one doesn’t ask permission. It walks in, turns off the lights, and locks the door behind you. Two hours of repetition, escalation, punishment. But there’s something sacred buried under all that noise: a heat that purifies,. Gira’s voice sounds like it was dragged out of a cave. I photographed him once. He didn’t need direction — he just was. Same energy here: towering, feral, undeniable.
This is the sound of a man who’s made peace with the fire but still walks around with singed boots. Plant isn’t chasing youth here — he’s sidestepping it entirely, slipping into other textures. It’s melancholy without being sad, tender without getting soft. Grown music. A man in full, humming to himself after the flood.